Our Annual Open Source grant for 2018

The Annual Open Source grant

Starting from 2018, we're starting a program we call The Annual Open Source
grant where every year we will have an amount that we allocate to be given
to open source projects.

At the end of spring, the engineering team will get together and
decide which project and how much money each project will receive from the grant.
The engineering team will choose, among others, which project have had an
impact to us and our customers and then decide how much of the grant to be given
to each of the project.

The focus

What we want to focus on are two things:

Acknowledgement of the work done by the people of a particular open source
project

And the viability and continuity of this program and
not how large or small the amount that we can afford

In this small way, we would like to show that even small companies like us can
manage to give back and acknowledge the hard and good work that many folks of
the open source community have sacrified their time and energy on.

Hope to inspire

Hopefully, this will inspire and start more similar programs within other small
companies: If you have earned because your customers have acknowledged the value
that you bring to them, then we believe we should also ackowledge the value that
the open source community have helped us to bring to our customers. Be it a
hundred or a million in a year, let's put our money where our hearts are.

Grant recipients for 2018

For 2018, we have allocated USD1500 to be distributed to open source projects
that the engineering team have chosen.

Packaging managers are the backbone for any programming language ecosystem. Other
platform like Nodejs NPM or PHP Composer are very well funded so it goes without
saying for the Python community to keep PyPI running and improved.

We're using this library internally but as an API provider,
our customers probably will also be using it in their implementation. Continued
support to the development of this library will in the long run help our
customers as well.

There were a few more projects that the team would like to contribute too but unfortunately
they couldn't find an explicit donation channel from their websites. Among them - buildout, httpie,
pelican and sphinx.

P.S: Thank you to Beth Kanter for the open source your love thumbnail.

Iqbal Abdullah

CEO

Iqbal came to Japan in 1997, and graduated from the Engineering faculty of Saga University. After working through companies like Yahoo! Japan and Amazon, Iqbal founded MARIMORE Inc. in 2007 which was the previous version of Xoxzo Inc.